Why do we wait until someone’s memorial service to gather in their honor?

They say when a loved one dies, either you are glad you spent quality time with them recently… or you regret that you didn’t spend more time together.

Why not make that phone call to someone with whom you’ve had a disconnect. Give ten minutes of your time to invest in extending love… Reach out and show someone you’re ready to see them as innocent and give them a clean slate. Someone you have been avoiding because they remind you of… something in yourself that has not yet healed.

My mother’s will to live was so strong that her continued survival baffled the doctors. My sister, a nurse, said, “There is no medical reason for our mother to be alive. She is living on only 5% capacity of her heart. She is living on spirit alone.”

In an accident that my mother called “the mystery of my married life,” she made a wrong turn exiting the bathroom one night and fell down the basement stairs. She broke her nose, her wrist, her foot, and badly injured her back. The fall would have killed a healthy person. But Mom hung on for another month. “I’m not ready to die,” she would say.

Two days before she died, my father was visiting her in the hospital when he passed out right in her room and had to be taken to the emergency ward. My mother, never a religious woman, prayed in earnest for the first time in her life, I think.

It turned out that my father, a borderline diabetic, had fainted from low blood sugar. He was released and was able to walk back into her room within a couple of hours. “Now I know there is a God,” my mother told me later that evening.

The next day, when I went to visit my mother at the hospice, she had an aura of peace around her. She took my hand in hers and was very excited and joyful. “I understand now, Honey! I finally understand! If your music makes you as happy as my music has made me, then you go for it, Honey. And don’t let anyone stop you!”

My mother passed away peacefully in her sleep that evening, after she ate some vanilla ice cream. She was ready. But not before she had given me her blessing. It is my most cherished gift.